


Petite Soeur

by blak_cat



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-05 12:16:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4179525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blak_cat/pseuds/blak_cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not that Matska has always been an elder sibling to Carmilla, it's that Carmilla has always ever been her little sister.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Petite Soeur

Kitty always said you reminded her of Mother. And you took it as a compliment, because Mother was powerful and beautiful and wise and Mircalla adored her so that must mean she adores you too. You were Lilita's firstborn, well perhaps she had other children long ago but they're not here now and after a hundred years she seems intent on keeping you. In her life, those hundred years may have been a blink of an eye, but for you it was everlasting paradise.

It was a life without restraint, you and Mother climbed mountains if you wished, stole away into archives and laughed at the snapshots of the world that mortal minds couldn't possibly comprehend, you danced through parties and laughed over wine as dynasties rose in Europe in the fall of Rome and the rise of jockeying empires.

"The world is ours dear Matska," she would say as you watched riots in the streets on London. "It's yours and mine."

She said this because you were sure you'd be the oldest things in the world one day. Outlasting it all together.

But then one night she told you she was going to a party. You hated the cold countries, and Styria was buried deep in winter and snow and maybe you couldn't really feel it the way you could so many years ago but you'd certainly rather not be feeling a warm sun and pretending to be unamazed at a crystal clear ocean.

"Are you looking for…" you didn't know what to call them because Mother didn't like you saying the word "sacrifice" in public. "Girls?"

You walked down the street together under an overcast sky and a parasol each. The ground was soggy under your feet and occasionally the air batted you with a heavy mist in the swell of wind. Shop signs creaked where they hung and you avoided carriages as they rolled by, displacing a wake of mud.

"Something like that," Mother said, taking your arm at the elbow and lightly patting.

"Am I coming with you?" you said

"Not tonight, dear."

You knew better than to argue or insist that Mother needed you. And you especially knew better than to try and go anyway. She always picked the girls to go to the light god, and so far it had not led you astray. Feed the god and the world doesn't end. So far she'd given you nothing to complain about and so you did as you were told that night, waiting dutifully in the grand apartment she'd procured for the sojourn in Austria.

But then she came home from the ball the following morning with a slip of a girl under her arm.

"Meet your new sister, Matska," she said softly and the only thing you felt in that moment was confusion.

She was a beautiful girl, her jaw, her cheeks, her nose all perfectly chiseled under ringlets of glassy black hair, mussed as it was. Her neck sported the flaking remnants of a red stream where you were certain two puncture wounds served as wells. Her eyes could be two moons in size if not for how incredibly dark they were in color and her face paler than even Mother's.

"Matska and Mircalla," Mother said. "What lovely names for a pair of sisters."

The girl was your responsibility for the rest of the night. Mother had "business" to attend to in the city before you left and she iterated strongly how much she refused to tote around a toddler, insisting that you make her self-sufficient by morning.

She spoke English, you learned, but heavily accented and you did not speak German so you settled on the middle ground of French for now. She told you that Mother had found her "pried apart the jaws of death to exact her rescue." You are certain those are Mother's words coming out of her mouth and you're also certain Mother went to that party looking for her. You wonder if you were so hand selected by Mother as this one seemed to be.

Mircalla von Karnstein she said her name was and her father was the count of the area, the town named for their family, which traced its ancestry back to Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor.

"That won't matter to you soon," you say as she proudly brandishes a handkerchief bearing the Karnstein arms.

"It matters to those with ancestries worth tracing," she said haughtily. What a brat.

You're the one to take her on her first feeding. The turning process makes one ravenous, you remember your own experience. So you wait until the sun is down and she's changed into less tattered and bloodstained clothes before taking her by the hand and leading her down the street.

"You can feed from almost anywhere," you said. "But the vein in the neck is by far the easiest."

She nodded dutifully but you could tell there was an underlying impatience in the way she twitched and occasionally took a step ahead of you. Her feet hit the stone below loudly and you made a note to teach her the art of quiet because humans were dumb but not deaf.

"How do you know whom to pick?" she asked.

"Convenience, size, health, take your pick," you said. "You'll know with experience, and victims always taste better."

"Taste better?"

"Fear makes the blood positively intoxicating. But we'll take it slow on your first go."

You found prostitutes on the street corner by the tavern. They seemed simple enough, as repulsed as Mircalla was by "their profession" and mumbled stories her father told her about them. And then she got sad and frowned and pulled out the handkerchief and worried it with the pads of her fingers. She would have to get over the homesickness very quickly.

"I wonder if they worry for me," she said.

"I am your family now," you said even though you didn't really mean it. "And so is Mother."

You took the handkerchief and tore it in two before tossing it into the mud. Then, before she could protest or cry, you protracted your fangs and barred them too her. She watched in rapt attention and pressed a thumb pad to her own blunt teeth.

"It will take practice," she said. "The first few times it may take some coaxing but eventually, it will be second nature to you."

You waited patiently for twenty minutes as she fought to get her fangs out, once or twice giving up completely, swearing she must still be a human, but you pushed her, eventually, by bleeding out of the women and letting her smell the red pooling there. The other gave chase and it kicked something on inside her because she sped after her, taking her down in a tackle.

It wasn't a clean kill. She ripped the woman's throat open more than actually drinking anything and it was hardly a slow, euphoric death that was supposed to come with a bite and suck at the neck. Still, she had potential in the mere ferocity hiding in her, it just needing coaxing. Perhaps Mother saw that in her, somehow, at the party. Perhaps she'd shoved some rival girl into the orchestra or refreshments or took to torturing servants for pleasure.

You doubted it though. It had more to do, you thought, with her molten eyes. They were darker than any you'd seen and they caught fire like embers, reflecting the deep, black color of blood directly back to the pool on the ground, too thick to hold mirrors to the stars above.

You helped her clean up later and retired to the library of the apartment where she happily began devouring a copy of some book and insisting on reading it aloud to you. You entertained her with a small smile before eventually she got hungry again and you took her back out, this time with much cleaner success as she carefully took down a stumbling bar patron.

And you let her learn the lesson of drinking alcohol drown blood, just making sure she worked off the wooziness by the time Mother got back.

\----

"It's interesting, the assentation that knowledge shouldn't be used for power, but then what other means are there to achieve it within Goethe's context? Perhaps it's more a critique on power itself—"

"Can you please stop talking to yourself?"

"I was talking to you but thank you for listening."

It was 1810 and you were sitting in London. Mircalla, as per usual, had her face practically flush to the pages of a book, this time it was _Faust_. She obsessed over them and Mother obliged and made comments about Mircalla's burgeoning intelligence as she swallowed languages and stories you honestly just wanted to get back to your chess game.

"I'd like to finish this game," you said.

"You said that 3 years ago," she said back, not looking up from the book.

"And when we started it in 1780, honestly Kitty," you said.

You had been a little bit jealous when she finally mastered the art of transformation and you saw her animal form was a giant black cat. It matched her perfectly though. Over the years she'd developed into a very specific type of killer, she had a knack for drawing in dead bodies to be and prowling in the dark. You called her Kitty because she started hating the name Mircalla around 1730 and she repaid you with "Mattie." Maman, as Mircalla called her, couldn't care less what you called yourselves as long as you showed up every 20 years, back in Styria, where she plucked Mircalla from in the first place.

"You know," Mircalla said, putting the book down. "If you just...maybe told me what the girls are for I promise I won't tell—"

"We've been over it Mircalla," you said sternly. "Mother will know in a second if I tell you."

"I'm not going to say you and Mother having secrets to each other makes me feel out of the loop but…"

You moved a bishop and silenced her with a black of wood on wood, putting the piece down poignantly.

"You'll find out when you're older," you said and watched her fight down a pout and you tried not to smile because you knew she'd walk off in a huff and you'd never finish your game.

She keeps quiet about questions for quite some time after that. She dutifully lures in girls, the occasional boys. Mother was always looking for subjects with strong thoughts, scholarly inclinations, students, philosophers, mathematicians. It wasn't virgins that mattered so much as people with minds worth devouring, souls worth stealing, brains worth picking.

Perhaps that's why Mircalla was so good at it. She taught herself Sumerian and took pages of notes on plays and novels she read at night. If she wasn't already dead, you were certain Mother would have pegged her as a target, then again, the haughty girl she'd been back in 1698 was hardly impressive. The growing and molding woman though, she was fascinating.

"The Metropolitan Museum of Art just opened in New York City," she said like a beg.

"You know where you're needed, Kitty," you said.

"Maman said the same thing," she sighed. "Except ten times scarier."

You laughed and pulled her into your side in a half hug, brushing a few strands of hair out of her face. She'd worked on the pouting thing in the past 70 years but something about your presence you think, always turned her into a little girl.

"We'll go in a few months," you promised. "I refuse to spend all of my 20 years of freedom in a grimy American city, but I can suffer a few weeks for you."

Mircalla laughed and rolled her eyes but placed a kiss on your cheek all the same and muttered a thank you as you walked into the carriage with Mother.

You had no idea how poorly things would turn that winter in Styria.

\----

You didn't believe Mother when she told you. Mircalla was callous and vicious and completely apathetic to the sacrifices. A vile attempt at cutting one loose? Even worse, Mother told you she insisted on loving this one, honest to God loving a human.

"Can I talk to her?" you ask because you're certain you can make her come to her senses.

"No," Mother said simply perhaps because she knows the same thing.

You were certain it was a burst of lust. She sometimes got that way, more than once she'd been scolded for "defiling" a sacrifice. But she'd never tried to hide one away for herself. And she'd never defied Mother. And now she was locked away somewhere and a scared, skittery little blonde girl was cowering in a corner with an endless stream of prayers and tears.

"You're going to Paris," Mother said. "Tonight."

"Why?"

She shot fire from her eyes as she whipped around violently and you felt yourself shrink so far back you hit the wall.

"Because I said so."

You nodded, eyes down, and quickly left the room, ignoring the whimpers of the doomed girl in the corner.

You paced in the forest by the chapel for some time, trying to prolong your departure long enough to catch a glimpse of your sister. But all through the night there was no sign of movement anywhere. The haze of dawn was beginning to bleed up from the edges of the Earth and you knew if Mother caught you still there she'd go into a rage.

One disobedient daughter, another considering disobedience for the sake of the other.

You did as you were told and went to Paris, hanging around for two weeks, before finally receiving a letter that called you back to Mother who was now in Stockholm.

When you arrived, Mircalla was nowhere to be seen. And Mother looked more agitated than you'd ever seen, possibly even depressed in small flashes. And you wonder if you'd been sent away to be spared pain at watching your little sister suffer or because she actually thought you might try and stop it. Mircalla had been her favorite, there was no doubt about that, that's why she was still alive.

\----

After a few decades you got over the nightly worries for Mircalla (Mother refused to tell you where she'd been buried). You got sad, occasionally, when you came across one of her old books still piled together with your own things (because she honestly left her things everywhere) and you mourned the loss of a chess partner.

Once or twice you maybe even thought of crying for her. But mostly you scolded her for her stupidity and called it a night.

Your new brother makes you realize just how much you constantly miss Mircalla, however, and you do your best to stay away from him in the 20 years you have away because you might kill him otherwise. Mother doesn't like him very much either you think, but he's her son and that's enough for her.

Mother decided shortly after Mircalla's internment to charter a school on the grounds over the lair of the angler fish god. It was brilliant, in all honesty, as Mother often was, bringing in hordes of young minds, brilliant scholarly minds and few people batted eyelashes at 5 going missing every 20 years. She made you a governor, William was delegated to playing the part of student every 20 years. He was never as good of a lure as Mircalla was, even Mother knows that.

It's like beautiful clockwork until the 1950s when you just about jump out of your skin when you see her, walking up to you with a shrug and smile broken in a few places.

"Mircalla," you said because it helps make her real in front of you. "It's been…"

"70 years," she said.

"You don't look a day over 18."

You shared a laugh and things were back to normal like she'd never been gone. You took her arm and walked with her, she latched onto your stories feverishly over wine as you lounged out over the Seine as the sun went down.

"You've heard of this business with the college then," you said.

"Mother's ransom for my freedom may have included something about it," she said, taking a long sip.

"You were always better at retrieving marks than anyone else," you said.

"Yes, it made me Mother's favorite," she said with an eyeroll.

"Perhaps."

You talk of your brother, evidently merely five minutes alone with him (Mother evidently insisted on quality time) was enough to send her running off to avoid slamming his face into the nearest brick wall (her words, not yours).

You spend the next few months catching up vigorously because you missed your little sister and she a lot beneath the Earth. The first time you play jazz for her you think her head might blow from mere excitement and you don't hear from her for days as she practically inhales every record she can find.

You go to operas together and crash parties.

You sit in a bar together and watch a man walk on the surface of the moon and Mircalla (she insists to you she's sticking to the anagram Carmilla and you're not sure why, perhaps as a testament to the last girl who knew her by that name, sentimental and stupid and mother will lash her for it) is all but glued to the TV in the closest thing to rapture a vampire might find. She's got some _thing_ for the stars now and you make fun of her constantly because it's oh so sappy.

Saigon is a week long headache and you don't even think Mircalla got out of bed for those seven days.

"Why am I only wearing one boot?" she says, walking out of the bedroom of the hotel in a crumpled, knotted mess.

"I think you traded it to that spice broker for cinnamon, but that also might have been me," you groaned, prepping for another round of downing Advil, hoping human remedies worked on you still.

"What did we need cinnamon for?" she asked, holding up the offending spice container.

"Hell if I know my dear," you say.

Then you're both bursting with laughter until Mircalla falls on the couch in a split headache and then you laugh some more.

Mother is livid to find you two like this and William is pouting that he'd been left at home.

\----

Mircalla had changed. Her nose was buried farther into books than you could ever remember, she'd traded her sharp wit for dry sarcasm and silence in any corner of the room. Perhaps 70 years of solitude would do that to you. But the meekness was hard to pinpoint. The viciousness of that first night out was a fire gone completely , in fact you though you'd seen her drink more from bags and cups than from a person and you feared she was trying to wean herself onto a "vegetarian" diet.

These were pieces of Carmilla, someone you were not entirely sure you knew. But it didn't make you love Mircalla any less.

You scolded her for all the times she came crying to Mother with a sob story over a mark who was just too precious to the world to lose. It was excessive and happened nearly every round of 20 years. And perhaps Mother was willing to see it as a burgeoning teenage phase of rebellion in the life of a relatively young vampire, but you knew heartsickness where Mother saw a spring of a dream soon to go out. And you didn't really like it. 

William tried to get her for it, desperate to be Mother's favorite child, but few things, and not even yourself, could come between Mother and her attachment to Mircalla. It didn't make you jealous as it made William because you think you loved Mircalla more and knew she loved you too best of all.

When you learn about the incident with the sword you're not sure if you feel impressed, betrayed, surprised, or appalled. What a defiance this was for the sake of not a poet or a dancer or a musician or a writer. It was a young girl she was desperate to save and you think you might smack her because she let infatuation get so far out of hand and now your mother was dead and the god hiding down below was denied and only a fluke in fate kept him at bay now and Mircalla alive.

But she's happy and hugging you and you're together again, so snacking on the little waif can wait until Mircalla's love affair with this one runs out of steam as well. 

It's bound to happen.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to throw together a little bit about Mattie and Carmilla ince we're sorely lacking in Mattie fanfiction and she's fab.
> 
> Also I apologize for any errors in this. Thanks for reading friends!


End file.
